


Ready Player Two

by ColaGrey



Category: Carmen Sandiego (Cartoon 2019)
Genre: Gen, Online Friendships, POV Player, later on: a LOT of lying, takes place in season 1 but canon compliant with season 2, the first two or so chapters are just a straight retelling of Becoming Carmen Sandiego
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2020-11-24 03:40:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20901041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ColaGrey/pseuds/ColaGrey
Summary: He's pretty sure he's doing the right thing, but he's also lying to anawfullot of people.A story about online friendships, using wicked skills for good, and the sacrifices we make for our friends without their knowing.





	1. The Morocco Field Trip Caper

**Author's Note:**

> anyway i have a lot of feelings about those weird, intense internet friendships that arise from paranoid forum culture where people who don't know your name and have never seen your face know you better than your own parents so this is an ode to that and later to tech folk actually taking care of themselves, willingly, of their own volition
> 
> also, fair warning: the plot's not going to hit for at least a couple of chapters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> white lies and no goodbyes.

It’s not that he’s bad at making friends. He’s just bad at making… _ friends _. The real deal. It’s hard to find kids his age who are still willing to unironically like things. Back in primary school, he could be excited about space and dinosaurs and robots and there’d be at least one other kid who knew more than he did, and half a dozen others swarming them with questions. Nowadays, if he so much as hints that he has interests rather than disinterests, he’s the subject of mockery. It’s exhausting. 

Black Sheep isn’t like that. Black Sheep doesn’t hesitate to enthuse at him about geography and is always down to learn about discrete logarithms and, for the first time in a couple of years, he feels like someone’s actually on his wavelength. It’s fun and weird and absolutely _ terrifying _ how quickly they’re becoming friends. 

“Who’re you texting, honey?” his mom asks, not looking away from the road. He’s trying to finish his debate with Black Sheep about the tourism industry before school starts. 

“A friend,” he replies vaguely. 

“One of your online friends?” They’ve already had the stranger danger talk, and his mom is _ sort of _ chill with him having online friends, but he’s been… well, a little secretive about Black Sheep. He’s not sure why -- they haven’t swapped as so much as _ names _, and the only thing she knows about him is that he lives in Ontario, so he’s pretty sure he’s not in any danger. Besides, he’s careful. His main hobby involves accidentally pissing off a lot of powerful institutions and the occasional intelligence agency, and Black Sheep doesn’t even have a personal computer. 

Actually, his mom might be a lot less chill with his online friends if she knew which forums he meets most of them on. Or how many times he’s received death threats from adults with military training. Black Sheep might well be the most mom-appropriate friend he had, if she wasn’t so cagey about everything. 

He should tell his mom about her. She’s just trying to connect. 

“Yeah,” is all he says instead, unable to look up from his phone. She wouldn’t understand anyway. 

Black Sheep concedes the debate, mostly because her lunch break is about to end and the instructor of her next class is harsh on tardiness. Player’s got a pretty good idea of which instructor it is, although he’s got no idea what the class is. All he knows about her school is it’s some sort of vocational institute and one of the instructors is her maybe-adoptive mom. 

He spends the morning impatiently waiting for her to get out of class so they can pick their conversation back up. His own school is more relaxed about cell phones -- a pretty low bar, since Black Sheep’s school seems to have a total campus-wide ban on cell phones _ and _personal computers, which seems downright draconian but certainly fits with the whole 27-layers-of-security thing. He used to think she was Quantico or Langley until he nailed down her timezone, which puts her in the UK, Portugal, or somewhere in central/west Africa. Her accent is mostly American, though.

It’s hard not to think about it. He feels like he knows her better than he knows anyone, but he also doesn’t know the first thing about her. Maybe that’s why he can’t tell his mom. 

His phone buzzes twice near the end of math. He spends the rest of the period trying not to bounce in his seat, hoping he doesn’t miss the window to chat with her in real time. 

His phone is out before he’s out the classroom door.

**Black Sheep  
** _11:28 am  
I_ _’ll be out of contact for a bit, Shadowsan’s taking us on a field trip for the weekend _

_ 11:29 am  
_ _Can’t wait to see how Sheena holds up camping_

He’s disappointed, but also thrilled. Sheena’s a classmate, he knows, but the name _ Shadowsan _ is new, and he immediately tries to work out where it fits into the puzzle of Black Sheep’s life. He feels a bit guilty about it, though, like he’s cheating at some undefined game. Every new detail feels like gift of trust that he’s misusing by trying to deduce more information.

Shadowsan. That had to be the harsh one. If she’d meant Coach, she would have just said so, and none of the other instructors struck him as outdoorsy enough for a field trip. 

**Player  
** _12:03 pm  
_ _How do YOU hold up camping? _

**Black Sheep   
** _12:03 pm  
_ _Better than Sheena, that’s for sure_

_ 12:03 pm _ _  
_ _ I was a wild child on a tropical island, I know my survival skills _

He’d ruled out the UK as a location the first time she’d mentioned the tropical island thing. He _ thinks _she’s in the northern hemisphere, so maybe off the coast of Cameroon or Nigeria? 

**Player  
** _12:04 pm  
_ _Well, that makes one of us_

_ 12:04 pm  
_ _I was in Scouts for like, two months and I was absolutely terrible at everything_

_ 12:04 pm  
_ _But have fun out in the great outdoors, I guess _

The Scouts thing is almost meaningless, but it’s nerve-wracking to drop it into the conversation. Is it too personal? Is she playing the same identity-puzzle game that he is? There’s something about forum culture that makes every personal detail feel significant and intimate. Black Sheep’s not from the forums (no one from the forums would have asked his location so directly) but on the other hand, she’s never once asked his real name, so she knows _ something _of anonymity culture. 

**Black Sheep  
** _12:05 pm  
__What are Scouts?_

...Of course, it’s hard to feel like he’s revealing too much when she asks questions like _ that _ . He once jokingly asked her if she was an alien, and then had to _ explain aliens _to her. She once mentioned offhand that she’d never seen a movie before and he’d nearly run into a wall. And yet, somehow, she speaks a dozen languages, has encyclopedic geographical knowledge. He likes to think he has a fairly scientific mind, but there’s definitely a post-it note somewhere on his mental file about Black Sheep which reads “maybe literally an alien?”

He spends the rest of lunch giving her a quick overview of the Scouts organisation, looking up info as he goes to preempt her inevitable questions, since it looks like they’ll just be leaving each other responses where they can until the weekend. As he’d guessed, she doesn’t respond, but he spends the rest of the school day checking his phone anyway. It’s a stupid habit -- it’s set to buzz, so it’s not like he _ needs _ to check it -- but they both keep weird enough hours that it _ feels _like she’s only five minutes away from responding at any given time. 

Case in point, despite her field trip, she gets off a message to him after school. He’s in the middle of analysing a bank’s encryption system, but it’s nothing time-sensitive, so he tabs out of the window.

**Black Sheep  
** _5:12 pm  
_ _Sheena may be bad at camping but Gray’s WORSE_

**Player  
** _5:12 pm   
_ _I thought Australians were good at the outdoors? _

**Black Sheep  
** _5:15 pm   
_ _Apparently even Australia has city folk_

_ 5:15 pm   
_ _g2g, there’s a prac starting in 10 _

Player isn’t sure what kind of vocation required practical classes at 10:25 pm in the middle of the wilderness, but he hopes one day he’ll find out. 

* * *

He gets a single message near the end of June, in the middle of first period.

**Black Sheep  
** _8:11 am  
_ _I didn’t graduate. _

He doesn’t quite know how to respond. Are things dire enough for him to push for details? Would that just make things worse? She’d mentioned something about Shadowsan’s exam, but she was also pretty pretty confident about all her other exams; surely that wasn’t enough to make her repeat? 

**Player  
** _8:15 am  
_ _In class, but here to listen. Are you ok? _

There’s no response. 

He checks his phone with increasing concern as the day drags on, but there’s no response. He considers calling her, but what if she’s in an appeal or something? It’s the _ worst _, knowing that she’s distressed but having no idea what’s going on, no way to help her, not even a back-up communication channel. 

He locks himself in his room after school and buries himself in code to take his mind off it, but he leaves the chat window on top and he can’t stop his eyes flicking towards it every time he pauses. 

**Player  
** _4:02 pm  
_ _Hey, I’m starting to get worried_

_ 4:02pm   
_ _Please tell me if you’re ok _

Nothing. He sinks back into his work. 

When the sign comes, it’s not from the chat window. 

“What the...?” he murmurs, leaning forward in his seat to examine the icon blinking off the coast of Morocco. The worry is still there, but barely discernible under the crashing wave of urgent curiosity. Well, she’s definitely not in appeals. 

“Player, not a good time,” is the first thing she says when she picks up, but at least she _ does _pick up. 

“Can’t cite the no cell phone rule if you’re not on campus,” he replies. “Taking a little field trip?”

“What?” she hisses. “How did you know?” 

For a half-second, he feels guilty about what is maybe sort of stalking -- should he really have had a program dedicated to picking up Black Sheep’s GPS signal running in the background of his PC for ten months? -- but it’s knocked aside by thirty-odd burning questions. Besides, it’s not like she didn’t _ know _about the tracker.

“Remember how I could never hack past the jammers at your school to triangulate your location?” he says. “Well, guess what? Your phone suddenly lit up on my dashboard. It looks like you’re currently travelling en route to --”

“Dude,” she says urgently, “hold that thought.” Player hears the garbled sound of an intercom, and then, “Gotta call you back,” and then the dial tone, and that’s the last he hears from her for four months. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> up next: screened calls and protocols


	2. The Spear Vishing Summer Caper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> dead ends and mysterious friends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gooooood morning, sorry it's been almost 6 months to the day since I last updated, even before [gestures vaguely at the world at large] this, I was swamped with graduating, jobhunting and then trying to work out how life works after uni. 
> 
> I've added an approximate length but like...it won't be 8 chapters. My outline says it'll be 8 chapters, which means it'll be like, 12. (The proof of this lies in how much bigger this chapter is compared to the first.) Anyway, thanks to everyone for being so nice about the first chapter! I hope this one lives up to your expectations.

And he'd thought a mere half day of radio silence was bad. It’s been a week and he keeps compulsively opening and closing his contact list, staring down the names of various federal agents he’s run across. None of them have jurisdiction in Morocco.

He wants to just _call_. Instead, he keeps playing back their conversation, trying to work out as much as he can from the background noise. (Look, sure it's a breach of privacy in some places to record without permission, but if he goes missing, he'd like to leave his parents _some_ hint as to why, if they can manage to crack the encryption on his harddrive.) His friend in Lisbon gives him a crash course in signal analysis, then the contact for her friend, an audio engineer. Even with their help, all he can work out is that Black Sheep’s last call was before a helicopter drop, and she was somewhere enclosed. Did she stow away on another class’s field trip? Was she running away from school?

In the back of his mind is the quiet, insistent thought that she might be in danger, but he’s quick to shut that down. _He_ may spend his time committing benevolent crimes in multiple countries, but that’s no reason to be paranoid. He’s got no evidence to suggest Black Sheep attends anything but a normal, albeit very wealthy, boarding school. She’s probably fine. There are plenty of reasons for her not to have called. Maybe she’s grounded. Maybe she just hasn’t been able to get away. Maybe her phone got confiscated.

It still nags at him, though. He feels like he’s only half living on this plane of existence, one foot firmly dissolved into cyberspace — well, more so than usual. He can convert to and from zulu time in his sleep, but he spends the last week of school thinking entirely in Morocco time, and as a result he manages to pick up a detention in the last week of the school year for repeated tardiness.

He gives in on the second day of the summer holidays.

It rings for a _long_ time. A long time. Player might be part of the hyperstimulated digital generation or whatever, but even his dad would agree with him on this one. He’s just about to hang up when the tone ends, and he thinks it’s rung out, but he can hear a breath on the other line and —

“Hello? Who is this?”

He hangs up immediately, heart pounding, and then berates himself for it. What, like he can’t handle one unknown adult now? He’s _definitely_ crossed paths with scarier people than the soft-spoken woman with a South Asian accent. Besides, all he wants to know is if Black Sheep’s okay. Whoever picked the phone up was probably faculty; he could have just asked.

He takes a deep breath and calls again. The response is quicker this time.

“Hello? Who is this?” It’s said in almost the exact same tone of voice, too: polite confusion.

“Hi, I was wondering if I could speak to Bl—” Player catches himself. “Uh, to the owner of this phone?” After all, it’s not like his parents know his usernames.

“This device has no owner,” the woman replies.

“May I speak to the...former owner then?” Player hedges.

“Do you know the former owner of this device? We have yet to track them down.”

Player has no idea what to do with that. It hadn’t occurred to him that Black Sheep might have just lost the phone.

“Uh, I probably can’t help you then?” he says. “Sorry. I was just...hoping to find out if my friend was alright.”

“Statistically speaking, probably not,” replies the woman matter-of-factly before hanging up.

She was probably just joking. Or being sarcastic. Or maybe just being very literal in a way that involved specifics he didn’t know about. That’s not enough to assuage his paranoia, so he opens the back door into the bizarre OS of Black Sheep’s phone.

He’s still digging through its weird, _weird_ file system, deleting all chat and call logs from the past ten months when he’s confronted with an incoming call from Black Sheep. He stares at the vibrating blue icon for a moment, warring with himself, but his paranoia wins out again. He checks which proxy he’s currently using and picks up.

“Chào buổi sáng, Hanoi River Tours,” he says cheerfully as he opens a new horribly named subfolder. He has no idea if it _is_ morning in Vietnam.

“Hanoi?” asks the voice from earlier. With the part of his mind not focused on wiping his presence from Black Sheep’s phone, he hears her say to away from the receiver, “I can’t imagine why Black Sheep would be in contact with a tour company.”

Another woman — British, maybe? — responds, “A _tour_ company? It must be a ruse. I’ve taught her better than _that_, at least.” At last, Black Sheep’s weird ideas about tourism, explained. The phone must be handed off, because her next words are spoken into the receiver. “Listen to me, you pathetic little man. If you don’t tell me _exactly_ how long you have been in contact with that brat Black Sheep, we will bring the full might of our organisation against you and scrub your very existence from not just this life but the next, do you understand?”

It’s all he can do not to laugh. Finally, some familiar ground. It’s certainly the most interesting threat he’s received in the last two months. This conversation has given him a wealth of new information about Black Sheep that he hasn't even begun to process yet, but that's never stopped him running his mouth before.

“I’m very sorry, but I don’t believe I know any Black Sheep,” he says innocently. “Maybe you have the wrong number?”

“The wrong — _you_ called _us_, you insignificant toerag!”

“Oh, you’re returning a call?” Player says. “I haven’t made any outgoing calls today, but I can check with my coworkers, if you’d like?”

“Cease this _pointlessness_ and tell me _how long have you known Black Sheep?_” demands the Countess.

Distantly, Player hears the first woman say, “The signal _is_ coming from Hanoi, Countess. Perhaps it was a misdial?” and the call ends abruptly.

Countess. Black Sheep calls one of her instructors that. So Black Sheep’s phone is in faculty hands, unless she knows a lot of nobility — which admittedly she might, if her school’s as wealthy as he thinks it is. His best guess is that Black Sheep dropped her phone and it was picked up by the staff who recognise the pseudonym but don’t know who it connects to. She _is_ a notorious prankster. Maybe she signs her work.

He leans back in his seat as his last search through Black Sheep’s phone for his own identifiers turns up nothing except the last two calls. They use a well-secured VOIP line, so he leaves them and exits out, unwilling to leave himself open to a trace.

He rests his chin on his hand, thinking. The frustrating thing is that if he’s right, there’s really nothing he can do to contact her. Even if he can find the school’s number — which he doubts — he doesn’t know her real name. And if he uses Black Sheep’s phone and describes her _and_ the staff can work out who she is, then he’s just gotten her in trouble for breaking the no-phone rule and whatever other trouble she’s caused.

Of course, he could be wrong. In which case surely he should gather a bit more information, right? Besides, he’s on vacation. The whole _point_ is to have fun.

* * *

He'd thought that the more he learned about Black Sheep's teachers, the more her school would make sense. He was wrong.

"When does she _sleep_?" he mutters to himself, staring down the plot of various staff members' presence on his calls. The Countess isn't anywhere to be seen before 10am, and 5am seems to be the domain of Coach and a very terse Japanese man, but the good Doctor Last-Name-Unknown has been around at some point every hour. Does she sleep in forty minute blocks like a mouse? Does she have a twin who is also a doctor? Does she do rotating shifts like a hospital? Is Black Sheep's school so dangerous that it needs a fully qualified live-in surgeon?

He cleaned down the cheap whiteboard living on his wardrobe door for the first time in at least two years to keep track of his more pressing questions for when he gets in contact with Black Sheep again. Less than a week later, he had to buy another whiteboard. He likes a good digital list but sometimes you just need the catharsis of writing half a dozen big question marks. In his case, about twice a week.

He still has a copy on his phone for the realisations that hit when his parents drag him out of the house. He's beginning to think he'll be the first person to ever find the word limit of his memo app.

* * *

"_Moshi moshi_, Osaka House of Okonomiyaki."

"Do _not_ foul my language with your terrible accent."

"...Sorry."

* * *

For all the oddities he hears, there's nothing about Black Sheep herself, but maybe she's toeing the line after her latest misadventure. He's still searching for the best way to ask "who crashed that field trip in June?", since that seems like the best avenue to her identity. When he's not working on his other philanthropic ventures, he scours the web for details on a private vocational school on west African islands in the hopes he might find an administration number — or even the number for the campus security Black Sheep was always dodging — so he can make those very inquiries.

Sometime in August, he gives up on both his search and a tidy chunk of his morals and tries his hand at social engineering. He's at something of a disadvantage — he can only disguise his voice so much -- but he's got a plan and a half decent voice modulator. He knows people who specialise in white hat social engineering, but it just doesn't sit well with him. Sure, people are bigger security vulnerabilities than mathematics, but they're just trying to do their jobs; he doesn't like the idea of getting low-level employees in trouble for being insufficiently trained. If he goes directly for the king, the only messenger getting shot will be him.

But he does know social engineers, and he's picked up some tricks, if only by osmosis.

It takes him a while to come up with an attack. He starts out investing in a 6-pack of coloured dry erase markers and cleaning up his new whiteboard so he can collate every exploitable weakness he's picked up about the faculty, as well as every social engineering attack he's confident he could pull off. He has to cross off more than three quarters immediately: he has neither a door into the school's network, nor a way to be physically present, unless he can teach himself to convert his body to and from EM waves over the summer.

He comes up with a collection of facts and the frustrating feeling that he _could_ solve this if he could just hold everything in his brain at once. Fortunately, his subconscious seems to have this exact superpower because he jolts awake at 2:13 am with the sketch of an attack addling his brain.

He scrabbles for a whiteboard marker and then a light switch. He'd formulated the scheme within the dream, as he'd dispassionately watched a faceless Black Sheep die alone in a hospital bed, her body shattered by a long fall. It took him a long moment to convince himself it wasn't a memory.

"She wouldn't just jump out of a helicopter without a parachute," he tells himself aloud, voice raspy from sleep. "She's just… boarding school grounded."

Still. He's a little reluctant to sleep, so he uncaps his marker and gets to work.

* * *

The next night, he puts his plan into motion. To prepare, he writes a little piece of code that makes his skin crawl a little, then switches to a different VOIP line, this one routed permanently through a proxy server in England. He sets an alarm for 3am, and proceeds to barely sleep.

He gets up from his tumultuous nap about five minutes before his alarm is due to sound, dons his hat, takes a deep breath, and calls.

"Good morning," he says in his best Received Pronunciation. He spent two hours the previous day listening to Attenborough documentaries while finally committing code to all the open source repositories he helps with. It should have been a ten minute job, honestly, but there were… a lot of conflicts to resolve. He's usually better about that type of thing, but between school and the Black Sheep case and the other hacks he finished recently…

He'd been aiming to avoid the Countess, who'd see through his fake accent in a second. "Who is this?" demands Coach. He breathes a sigh of relief while she rails. "Who the damn hell are you and how the damn hell do you know Black Sheep?"

It's possible he's been overdoing the prank calling.

"What in the world is Black Sheep?" he asks. "No, never mind. May I please speak to Mr Johnson?"

"Mr _who_?"

"Mr Johnson. Is this not his phone number?"

"There's no _Johnson_ here," Coach snarls down the line.

"Oh, I must have a wrong number then, sorry. Thank you for your help," Player says, before hanging up.

He waits about twenty seconds, then redials.

"Good morning," he repeats. "Is this Mr Johnson?"

"No, it's damn well not, you poncy piece of —" Coach begins, which is not encouraging, but Player plays on anyway.

"Oh no, did someone take down the wrong details? This is your own phone, right?"

"Why d'you need this Johnson fella so badly anyhow?" Coach asks rhetorically. Well, Player will take any in he can get at this point. All the faculty have been pretty nasty to him, but he thought that was just in response to the prank calling. Black Sheep's never complained about them being mean before.

"I'm supposed to tell him that his wife's been hospitalised. He's listed here as her emergency contact, and this is the only number I've got for him. I guess he changed his number or lost his phone?" He feels his fauxent sliding and perhaps overcorrects as he adds, "Oh, this is dreadful, just dreadful, I don't know what I'm going to do if I can't reach him…"

"Well, I'm afraid you're shit outta luck," Coach says, not sounding sorry in the slightest. "None of our students have phones —"

"Oh, you're a school?" Player interrupts a little desperately, sensing the situation slipping from him. "Could Mr Johnson be a parent or guardian, or — is there an administrator I could speak to who could help me track him down, or —"

"What do you think this is, a charity?"

"Of course you're busy, but I'm sure Mr Johnson would want to reward you for returning his phone, or, uhh, I could pay you! Please, his wife is in critical condition —"

Coach scoffs, which stuns him into silence. "That's what you get for your namby pamby socialised healthcare," she crows. "Long wait times, bad administors, serves y'all right. It's money that makes the world go round, not inefficient government schemes --"

Player barely listens. After about ten seconds, he does the unfathomable and hangs up on her. He tugs his headphones off and takes a moment to just gape at the whiteboard propped up on top of his PC tower, at the words "helpfulness" and "reciprocity" written in green down one side, the common human pressure points he'd been planning to leverage.

Setting aside for a moment the grim reminder that healthcare was a controversial topic in some places, it was disturbing, the fact Black Sheep's mom -- or the closest thing to it -- was the kind of woman to relish the prospect of someone dying alone in a hospital while their spouse was none the wiser. It was _cartoonishly_ evil.

Player stares at the whiteboard a moment longer, at the brief notes he'd made under each faculty members' name, then wipes it clean with his hand. He's even more worried about Black Sheep than ever, but he's done with spear vishing -- he's clearly not cut out for it, given how badly he got Coach's motivations wrong -- and he's out of options, so he tabs open all the forums he's been neglecting to keep up with and resolves himself not to dwell on it. She'll contact him if she can. Until then, there's nothing he can do except keep himself busy.

* * *

He doesn't _forget_ about her. Honestly, he couldn't if he wanted to, what with someone calling from her number about once a fortnight -- his upcomance for pranking them all summer, probably. He picks up every time, screening out of habit, but by mid-November, he's pretty much lost hope, and he's got school to worry about. When another call comes at the start of December, he contemplates for half a second just giving up, but he just...can't. Not yet.

"Guten tag, Strudelhaus of Düsseldorf. Can I help you?" he says tiredly, not looking away from his compiler, which is throwing up an alarming number of bugs at him. It takes a moment of her stuttering for him to even recognise her voice. "It's me, I'm screening!" he assures her, if only to stop her sounding so anxious. Black Sheep _never_ sounds anxious.

"Player," she breathes, and while he appreciates the sentiment, he has many, many pressing questions for her.

"Where have you _been_?" is the first one, followed by a very understated, "Strange people have been answering your phone!"

"It's...not my phone. I stole it."

"So you're a shoplifter," Player guesses, narrowing his eyes at the waveform of her voice in a small window in the top left corner of his screen. "And you haven't called me all summer long because you've been in jail." He's trying to make her laugh — there's too much weirdness around her for it to be something that simple — but instead she just sighs heavily.

"Player, remember when you told me you used your wicked skills for good?"

"The white hat hacker's code."

"What would you say if I told you… I had wicked skills too?" Black Sheep asks tentatively. He gets the sense she means something beyond her pranks, and sure enough, she adds, "...from being raised in a school for thieves?"

There's a beat between them while Player's brain tries to comprehend the answer to about 75% of the questions on his megalist of Black Sheep Mysteries. "I'd say...that would a lot," he manages around that.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Black Sheep whispers, which, like. It’s midday on a Saturday. What’s he going to do, abandon his friend who’s been absent for _five months_ to go grocery shopping with his dad?

Almost as he thinks this, he hears a knock on his door. He hastily mutes his mic and hangs his headphones around his neck. “Come in!” he calls.

It is, in fact, his dad. “Hey, kiddo, your mom and I were thinking of seeing a movie this afternoon. We could see that Spiderman one you were excited about?”

...Surely Black Sheep would understand him abandoning her for — no, who’s he trying to kid, Black Sheep has never actually seen a movie because she was _raised in a school for thieves_.

“Player,” he hears through his headphones, and he holds up a finger to his dad as he lifts one side of the headphones to his ears. His dad, well accustomed to this behaviour, holds his hands up in surrender and steps backwards through the door.

Player eyes the still-open door as he unmutes his mic and listens to Black Sheep. “I’m staring at a hard drive containing data that could fuel a criminal empire for a _year_,” she says, and now she _definitely_ has his attention. “This may be my only shot to secure it.”

“Then use those wicked skills already,” he tells her, before muting his mic again and tossing his headphones onto the keyboard.

He nearly butts heads with his dad in his haste to get through the door.

“Sorry,” he says, and he really, really means it. “Raincheck. I’m helping with an open source thing and the deadline’s tonight. Have fun at the movie!”

He shuts the door before his dad can respond, and throws himself back into his seat. He’s barely in time to hear the garbled voice of an unknown woman and Black Sheep herself hiss, “Gah, missed it!”

He’s about to hit unmute when she continues, “If anyone sees me take it, I’ll never make it off this island. I need to avoid detection at all costs — ah, crud.”

There follows the strangest, most one-sided conversation Player’s ever heard. He knows Black Sheep’s mic isn’t uni-directional — it picked up another voice _minutes_ ago — so his best guess is that whoever caught her is using pen and paper to communicate.

“This is the most one-sided conversation I’ve ever heard,” Player says during one of the lengthy pauses.

“Shh, quiet,” Black Sheep chides. Player makes the same gesture of surrender his dad just made, even though she can’t see it, and lets her finish the conversation.

“It was just some creepy mime who hangs around campus watching everything,” she explains, and he’s _just_ about to point out the obvious problem with that when she realises it herself. “...And everyone, because he’s a spy and a snitch!”

There’s the sound of a scuffle, and about thirty long, long seconds later, Black Sheep says, “All good. I’ve locked him in the janitor’s closet.”

“They don’t teach lockpicking at your thieves’ school?” Player asks. Rather than a response, he hears a door opening, a threat, and the door slamming shut again.

"Time to catch the bookkeeper," Black Sheep says, and then her mic picks up nothing but her laboured breathing. Player feels sort of useless, but at the same time, it's exciting to bear safe witness to what's turning into a high-stakes heist.

“Key card activated elevator,” she gasps after a moment. “If she makes it to the server room, she’ll upload the data.”

“So you can’t let her see you take the drive,” Player guesses, “but if that elevator leaves without you...game over.”

“Gotta think fast,” Black Sheep mutters to herself. He’s not sure what she does next, but he hears the elevator ding and Black Sheep begin to address someone else. For a born-and-raised thief, she’s not a good liar.

He stays quiet this time around, determined not to distract her. He notes the hissed hydraulics of the elevator door, the way the woman with the data drive — Ms Booker? _Cookie_ Booker? That _can__’t_ be a real name — sounds more distant, and he’s _desperate_ to know, but finally, there’s another hiss and —

“Got it,” Black Sheep says smugly. “Bait and switch.” Player feels a small glow of pride, but pushes it aside to focus on the more pressing matter.

“Do you have an escape plan?”

“The only ways off the island are the chopper, which I can’t fly, the sub, which I can’t drive, or Cookie Booker’s boat. That’s the reason I had to wait so long to contact you. She only visits once a year.”

Player sits back in his chair. “Your plan was always to escape,” he says out loud. “The data drive —”

“A crime of opportunity,” Black Sheep confirms.

“Wait, _can_ you drive a boat?” Player asks.

“I aced Doctor Bellum’s class. How hard could it be?” she says over the hiss of the elevator doors. It’s the last thing he hears before the line drops. His attempt to call her back doesn’t go through.

Player takes a deep breath and tips his chair back. She’ll be fine. She has wicked skills.

He takes the enforced quiet as a sign he should get up and stretch a bit — he’d been at his desk for several hours even before Black Sheep called. He’s nearly done when she calls back.

“Player, I made it,” she says when he picks up. There’s an emotion in her voice that he can’t identify. “I’m off the island. I need to know where on earth I am.”

“Triangulating your position,” Player says, although he’s got a pretty good guess. He’s proven right a moment later.

“It was an interesting place to grow up," Black Sheep muses, "but it’s time to see the rest of the world. No more bookkeepers. And no more VILE.” 

He scribbles the name onto his whiteboard for further research as he says, “You’ll need a passport. And I don’t think Black Sheep’s gonna cut it. You do have a name, don’t you?”

“It’s…” The hesitation makes him think that maybe she didn’t. “Carmen,” she decides. “Carmen Sandiego.”

As he contacts the people who can help him build her a new identity, a question niggles at the back of Player's mind. He still has school and his other projects, and he can already tell that this is going to be more involved than anything he's done before. Whatever Carmen needs, it's not something for a weekend hobby hacker. Either he has to commit to whatever this thing is going to turn into, or he needs to be honest with her and set her up with another hacker, and soon, before his parents find out.

Eventually, Carmen finds a pen and asks the inevitable. As he gives the details of a nearby parcel pick up point he uses sometimes, he wonders if it’s already too late to back out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise in the next chapter, the plot starts in earnest and also I can maybe stop spending as much time rehashing canon scenes
> 
> up next: changed lives and data drives.


End file.
